Blood Omen opens with a somewhat baffling scene of a rat-headed vampire storming into a castle and slaughtering several wizards, a guard being resurrected as a living suit of armor, and a series of nine tall white pillars erected in a forest staining and cracking. The game then transitions to gameplay, in which the player assumes control of a nobleman as he's being turned out of a tavern, and is then immediately confronted outside by a mob of assassins who yell "THAT'S HIM!" before killing him. If you're skillful, you can actually fend off a number of the killers, but to progress the game you have to accept that the man will die. Then another cutscene plays in which the man, named Kain, is resurrected as a vampire by another wizard and promised that he can have his revenge. The game properly begins with the vampire Kain awakening in a crypt and wandering out into the world.
The way the game actually plays is as a ponderous, adult-oriented take on The Legend of Zelda, with a top-down view of the action as Kain wanders through forests, towns, snowy fields, swamps, and castles, battling men and monsters. Kain accumulates new abilities that allow him to reach previously unreachable areas, such as the power to transform into a wolf, mist, or even a normal human, which opens the possibility of interacting with people who would normally flee from or attack a vampire. As a vampire, Kain maintains his energy by drinking blood from enemies, or occasionally from helpless victims. Having to clutch and suck blood from a neck like in traditional stories would likely have become tedious, so the game's solution is to allow Kain to raise his hand and simply yank all the blood from a victim out of their mouth, across space, and down his own throat. Sort of an inversion of the projectile vomiting from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness.
The game is fairly easy to complete, with most of the difficulty coming from enemies that can cast homing projectiles at you. The ability to cast a shield spell trivializes most of the challenge in the latter part of the game as you can simply plow through attacks, chop down enemies, and then recharge your mana before casting the shield again.
In terms of art direction, the game is very classical gothic horror, down to the Germanic towns you visit, and it's full of colored lighting effects. If a person was ever curious as to what Mario Bava's interpretation of Zelda might look like, this game probably comes as close as any to fulfilling that.
Blood Omen is uncommonly good in terms of how it tells a complex story through a video game. Although there are some crudely rendered, poorly aged CGI cutscenes, a lot of the game's story and lore is imparted to the player simply through narration that occurs during gameplay. Whereas many games fall to the temptation to inflict many minutes if not hours of non-interactive cutscenes on the player, Blood Omen is admirably restrained and adheres to brevity. It doesn't hurt that the cast, with actors like Simon Templeman and Tony Jay, give very good voice performances. Characters are quickly established, there are a couple of interesting plot twists, and the next goal on the map and in the plot is always clearly explained. The story itself involves Kain being manipulated by greater forces of his world to perform a mission of assassinating the wizards appointed as the guardians of the Pillars of Nosgoth. For reasons explained throughout the game, the guardians have fallen into paranoia and infighting and must be eliminated so that the magical pillars they represent can be cleansed and forces of chaos expunged from the world.
It's hard not to look at Kain with his white mane of hair and chalky complexion and not think of Elric, although their personalities are rather different, and of course Elric merely wielded a vampiric sword while Kain is the vampire himself. There are also some similarities in terms of their stories' concerns with free will. For his part, director Denis Dyack said the storyline was influenced by Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series and the Necroscope books by Tarra Khash writer Brian Lumley, with the idea of the Pillars of Nosgoth coming from his seeing a copy of Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth and thinking the title sounded evocative.
Supplemental reading: Bloodstone, by Karl Edward Wagner
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